Nutcracker

I well remember reading an interview on the set at the time this film came out with Leslie Ash when in answer to a question about the double entendre in the title 'Nutcracker' blankly said "Where's the double entendre in 'Nutcracker'?" Other people are more likely to get the joke.

Joan Collins was on the verge of a big comeback as a soap opera diva that lasts to this day while poor Carol White was positively at her last gasp.

The actual story is a relic of the Cold War with Finola Hughes as a latter day Ninotchka in the days before Soho cleaned it's act up, providing the sort of venues where this could be seen.

Disco was on its deathbed even as Joan Collins boogied in her mules during her 70s comeback (The Stud, The Bitch). So, what new moves could she try as the 80s dawned? Rejecting the idea of leading a troupe of bodypoppers, she simply remade her previous disco films in the ballet milieu. All the crucial elements are there: Joanie playing a tough cookie, lithe young things taking their clothes off, and once-respected character actors (hello, William Franklyn) standing around looking embarrassed.

Kitsch fans will particularly relish the performance of Cherry Gillespie (ex-Pans People, and "Disco Girl" in The Bitch. Or was it the Stud?)

Paul Nicholas is in it, some time after he got his kit off in "Hair", and before his glory days advertising Farah slacks and Rougemont Castle British wine.

Do not watch when sober, it's quite dull in such circumstances.

I remain a total NUT for camp as Christmas Joan Collins flicks! Not often hailed by cult movie fanatics, Anwar Kawadri's luxuriously limber, fabulously fleet-footed, defecting ballet dancer melodrama 'Nutcracker' (1982) is not so much cold war angst, but deliciously cold cream cheese! This amusingly ribald lark has handsome Paul Nicholas as randy, opportunistic, story-breaking shutterbug Mike McCann and buxom Carol White as his equally libidinous, delightfully outspoken paramour Margaux Lasselle, both becoming erotically entwined in this adorably chipper, empty-headed dance flick, generously bejewelled with some beguilingly bawdy dialogue! I find this type of unrepentantly smutty/glitzy/chintzy 80s gubbinz irresistible, so why not take a sneaky pecan at the glisteringly glam/ham Joan Collins at her haughtily duplicitous, ostentatiously coutured, languorously lingeried, silkily snide best!!!

And lest we forget, the bizarrely underappreciated 'Nutcracker' generously introduces us to the entrancingly luscious Finola 'Staying Alive' Hughes as the impossibly limber 'Nadia' the boldly defecting Russian ballerina. While not without missteps, Kawadri's burnished 'Nutcracker' remains a heady, garishly glossy, lycra-lavish, blithely bed-hopping, perkily pirouetting 80s schlock classic! With most of the physical activities are of a more primal 'horizontal' variety, dance classists may want to look elsewhere, but ardent trash aficionados might well appreciate Nutcracker's hedonistic, gallopingly gaudy, innuendo-laden text and high-gloss disco-degenerated aesthetic! 'Nutcracker' boasts a marvellous supporting cast, including beloved rent-a-ruskie Vernon Dobtcheff, waspish Murray Melvin, and the urbane William Franklyn being deliciously sinister as the unrepentantly corrupt uncivil servant Sir Arthur Cartwright, plus a frothy, pop-tastic theme by Paul Nicholas and you have 101 sticky-sweet minutes of pure cinematic candy floss, and while the memories may not linger, it certainly tasted uncommonly yummy at the time!

Only purchased the film as I am a massive fan of the late Carol White. Good performance from Carol White, Paul Nicholas & Joan Collins too. It's an ok film but also great to look back at the Covent Garden/London scenes of 37 years ago👍